Wednesday 13 January 2010

A Scandinavian/English grammar, continued

More progress on the Scandinavian/English grammar:
  • I've now got quite reasonable initial rules for negation and lexically passivized verbs, two of the largest holes in the Swedish. Negation, in Swedish, is just an adverb. I did however have to add a feature which distinguished main clauses from subordinate clauses, since the negation adverb occurs after the verb in a main clause, and before it in a subordinate clause. It turned out to be easy to adapt the existing rules for passives to handle lexical passives as well: the grammar now allows passive versions of the present, imperfect, supine and infinitive forms. Thus for example den kan inte köpas här, "it can not buy-INF-PASSIVE here" = "it can not be bought here".
  • I've improved the coverage in the Swedish version of MedSLT. I can now translate 92% of the combined interlingua corpus into Swedish, and translate back 99% of the results. This mostly involved adding new lexical items and transfer rules, though I also had to make a couple of minor adjustments to the grammar.

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